I am having an issue with my FireBird V4. I bought a brand-new hard drive and received it. I flashed ApolloOS OMNI on it and it works 100% in WinUAE with the installation setup. When I take this same drive to my Amiga 500 I am having problem. It detects the hard drive and it starts having hard drive activity. Then it attempts to load the apollo OMNI menu, I see the Amiga rebooting again...once it reboots it freezes...the screen is gray and nothing happens. There is no hard drive activity then BANG ApolloOS startup kickstart screen appear. I can soft reboot forever and still the same thing, the ApolloOS startup kickstart screen. When I press the two mouse buttons it detects only DF0: and no longer detects the hard drive. I have to power cycle it and when I power cycle it...it repeats the same symptom.

However, I take the hard drive back to PC and use WinUAE it works great and i can do the installation and modifications again. What can I do to fix this issue?

What harddrive is this?
How did you connect it?
How is it powered?

That is ok. I decided to reflash it with Apollo-SOLO instead and picked OS 3.2.2 as the main OS. I then used fixhddsize and made it see the 320 GB. Then I used hdtool and DESTROYED DH0: by partitioning to both sides ...making the HDD unbootable. Then I took it to a USB converter using WinUAE I partitioned DH0: to 7 GB PFS and the remaining DH1 as PFS. Using Apollo-SOLO OS 3.2 installation in WinUAE I formatted both partitions, copied the OS into DH0: and copied as much as whatever I wanted in DH1.

Then I took the hard drive back to the main Amiga and TA-DA it is working. Without WinUAE life in the Amiga community will be almost impossible! Now! I have a bootable drive. Because it is IDE and I do not want to damage or bend the pins of the hard drive, by end of 2025 if there is still no problem with the hdd and or I did not have to reinstall everything again...I will take it out of the Amiga and make an img of it as a backup and put it back into the Amiga. Every year, I will take it out of the Amiga...make a new img backup and put it back into the Amiga. Since right now there is no software like ApolloExplorer can make an image copy of my Amiga hard drive as a backup method...sadly. I have no choice but to remove it from the Amiga and do it that way. What a shame.

No. There was never a firebird issue at all. This card is solid stone and have revolutionize the entire Amiga 68k history until end of time. You have turned Amiga 68k into an Amiga 5000 PPC for OS 4.x, but 68k instead. We no longer have issue with hardware, we have issue with software. We need games and applications to exploit this new technology even if they are V4 exclusive and cannot run on emulator or outside V4 (I prefer it that way myself). My problem was help on the Amiga hard drive, partitioning and possible even image or something. Like I did not understand why it works on WinUAE and not real hardware.

But now I learned something. WinUAE is fake..it have not succeeded to really emulate Amiga 100% the way it should. If it have been a pure authenticate 100% legit emulation..it would have given me the same problem on WinUAE than on Amiga real hardware. That been said, I think the issue might be the image itself. Because I used Apollo SOLO from Willem instead of the OMNI and picked OS 3.2 as the main OS and now it runs so good that even old games I used to have when running on OMNI freezes and crashes are solid for days on end here.

I wish though that ApoloExplorer is updated so a person can make an image copy of their hard drive without physically removing the hard drive and using windows and ability to drag and drop adf from windows into the disk icon on apolloexplorer and immediatley flash the adf back to real disk. These are my two main complaints really.